UnicornRiot

UnicornRiot, 3 days ago

Unicorn Riot was on the ground in the Nuseirat refugee camp documenting family members bidding farewell to their loved ones killed by the Israeli military.

https://vimeo.com/955379684

UnicornRiot, 5 days ago

Issue #1: Two Cousins Turned On Mahdi
Judge Cahill didn't allow Mahdi’s murder trial jury to hear Ahmed had a life sentence over his head before agreeing to testify in exchange for reduced sentence.
The day after Mahdi's conviction, Abdisalan appeared to brag about killing people

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

Mahdi said growing up in the system & having a guardian who was illiterate & didn’t speak English made him an easy target for police to pin the murders on. “I was the perfect scapegoat,” he exclaimed.
Mahdi’s life story is something movies are made out of.

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

When his friend died, the parents offered him an opportunity to go to America, but he would have to assume the identity of their son, and keep it a secret. The couple abandoned Mahdi. He ended up in and out of foster homes, group homes, and juvenile detention centers.

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

He was reunited with who he thought was his grandmother. Mahdi admitted that he wasn’t an angel. “I had to take care of myself,” he explained. “How could they blame me for surviving when I was just a kid and they put me in that situation in the first place?”

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

Mahdi continued to get in trouble as a teen, though he said he never carried guns and mostly got into trouble for theft and stealing cars. “But I am not a killer,” he insisted.

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

After Mahdi’s arrest, the woman he believed was his grandmother, Sainab Osman, revealed that she was really his biological mother, which was also backed up by DNA tests. Osman, with whom Mahdi shares a striking resemblance, spoke to UR through an interpreter.

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

Before trial, Osman produced Khalid Farrah’s Kenyan birth certificate stating that he was actually born on August 25, 1994, in Nairobi, making him 15 years old at the time of the murders, requiring his case to remain in juvenile court.

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

But Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill rejected the document and instead allowed the state to have a dentist examine the teen’s teeth, a practice that is widely criticized as questionable science. The state’s witness testified that his teeth made him at least 17 years old, allowing the state to try him as an adult.

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

UR reviewed more than two thousand pages of documents, including the police report, trial transcripts, news reports and other legal documents. We conducted numerous phone interviews with Mahdi from prison, interviewed Mahdi’s mother, his friend he was with the night of the killings and several other sources, as well as reviewed parts of surveillance footage related to the crimes, all creating a very different version of events than the official account.

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

This report documents nearly thirty issues we found in the official investigation of the Seward Market murders, from minor to major — detailing unethical practices used by police and prosecutors including the use of a paid informant and a jailhouse snitch, circumstantial evidence that points to other suspects, and the statement from Ahmed Ali that he lied about Mahdi’s involvement.

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

... all showcasing a fixation by authorities to convict Mahdi while the evidence suggests that the real killer escaped accountability. https://unicornriot.ninja/2024/target-junk-science-and-unreliable-testimonies-the-contentious-conviction-of-15-year-old-mahdi-ali/

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

Check the story for 27 separate issues we investigated in Mahdi Ali's triple murder investigation and conviction.
https://unicornriot.ninja/2024/target-junk-science-and-unreliable-testimonies-the-contentious-conviction-of-15-year-old-mahdi-ali/

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UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

During our investigation, community members (who did not want to go on record) told Unicorn Riot, based on reviewing the surveillance videos of the crimes, that they don’t believe the killer was Abdisalan or Mahdi.

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

Mahdi has never wavered. He has maintained his innocence for nearly half of his life that he has spent, he argues, wrongfully incarcerated. He told Unicorn Riot that he would rather kill himself than admit to a crime he didn’t commit. While in prison Mahdi received his GED and earned a paralegal degree.

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

Another source told Unicorn Riot that fellow inmates at the Rush City Correctional Facility, where Mahdi is currently incarcerated, described him as someone who “stands out,” and is very much “a leader and a mentor” to the younger guys.

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

Mahdi said he'd be an asset to society if set free. He knows he has a lot to prove to his community and believes if he had the chance, he wouldn’t let the people down. “I just wanna give back to my community and show them that I’m not the person everyone was misled to believe.”

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

This report - which scrutinizes the role of Target Corporation forensics investigators in Mahdi Ali's trial - is the final capstone in a 12 part series
https://unicornriot.ninja/21st-century-jim-crow-a-series/
21st Century Jim Crow in the North Star City
How Target Corp., the City of Minneapolis, and Hennepin County Created a Domestic Spy Program that Rolled Back Civil Rights on its Black Population

UnicornRiot, 6 days ago

This report investigating Mahdi Ali's triple murder conviction took countless hours of research and editing.
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